Hi-Media launches anniversary site www.fallberlinwall.com, in support of Reporters Without Borders

The online media group Hi-Media Publishing, one of the world’s leading Internet publishers, is teaming up with Reporters Without Borders to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November by launching a temporary website, www.fallberlinwall.com, that invites visitors to help to symbolically tear down the wall again, brick by brick. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Eastern Bloc’s ensuing collapse meant the end of an Iron Curtain that also concerned the media. For decades, European peoples on the wrong side of the curtain had been forced to listen to foreign radio stations or get banned newspaper and books in order to find out what was going on in their own countries. After the fall of the wall, they finally won access to freely reported news and information and regained possession of their own history. Beginning on 9 November, Internet users in France and 47 other countries will be able to go to the www.fallberlinwall.com website, choose one or more bricks, and destroy them by sending an SMS, the price of which will go to Reporters Without Borders. Each smashed brick will display the name of the donor, who will received a digital certificate recording their participation in the destruction of the 2009 Berlin Wall that they will be able to post on their profile in Facebook or other social networks. All the proceeds from the wall’s destruction will go to Reporters Without Borders. They will help the press freedom organisation to continue its work, ensure its independence and undertake new projects.